Starbucks wants your phone as much as it wants to sell you coffee

Starbucks SBUX on Thursday reported a stellar fiscal third quarter report that sent the company’s shares to fresh all-time highs. Same-store sales were up 8% globally, bolstered by a 9% increase in the U.S. as traffic dramatically increased. All regions performed well, and for the upcoming fiscal 2014 Starbucks projected revenue will increase about 10% to 13% bolstered by new store openings and growth as existing locations.

But the coffee giant’s executives talked more about investments in mobile rather than discuss the latest coffee or tea brews.

That’s because Starbucks says investments in the mobile experience, including a growing loyalty card program and digital payment apps, are what’s helping power the company’s growth.

“Mobile order and pay is enabling us to serve more customers more quickly and efficiently and to significantly reduce attrition off the line,” Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz told analysts.

Starbucks tossed out a few key statistics to make its case for why investments in mobile, while costly, are a worthy expense. The “My Starbucks Rewards” loyalty program now has 10.4 million active members, up 28% from a year ago, and those shoppers now account for about 30% of business in North America. Mobile payments account for 20% of all in-store transactions in the U.S., more than double the figure Starbucks reported two years ago. The company has also signed up recent partnerships with The New York Times, music streaming service Spotify and ride-sharing startup Lyft in an attempt to win over even more coffee and tea lovers.

Schultz pointed to comments he made two years ago when he noted that traditional brick and mortar retailers needed to recognize that there was a shift in consumer behavior when it came to mobile. He said most competitors invested in digital advertising, but Starbucks has spent money on improving the in-store experience by adding mobile to the check out and even in limited markets, ordering.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, as Starbucks was always ahead of the curve. It introduced WiFi in its stores back in 2001, and at that time, even charged for the service (it is now free). The rationale was that if coffee lovers were using Starbucks restaurants for their Internet needs, they’d spend some money on drinks and food while spending time in Starbucks’ restaurants. Not all investments outside of the coffee experience paid off (the first WiFi provider went bankrupt and a music label shut down). But Starbucks should get some credit for thinking ahead of the pack.

“Mobile order & pay continues to be one of SBUX’s most exciting digital initiatives and is expanding nationwide by the holiday season this year,” said Wells Fargo analyst Bonnie Herzog in a research note. Herzog said even despite Starbucks’ investments for this fiscal year, most notably to support the company’s “digital ecosystem,” she believed the coffee company was poised “to deliver strong results through innovation and its vast international opportunity, setting the stage for further incremental growth in FY16 and beyond.”

Dave Asprey puts butter in his coffee, and he’s already convinced thousands of people to do the same. He’s also convinced a venture capital firm to give him $9 million to help him build his buttered coffee empire.

For the uninitiated, Asprey is the founder and CEO of Bulletproof, a company best known for this unorthodox concoction. He’s since developed a full-fledged diet based on the same health principles behind the coffee, as well as other food products and supplements. And now it’s planning to open several coffee shop locations with its new cash infusion — despite not having opened its first one, located in Santa Monica, California, yet. The coffee shop is slated to open its doors in the coming weeks.

“All of us were really excited to see Dave turn Bulletproof into a real company,” Trinity Ventures partner Dan Scholnick told Fortune. Trinity wrote the $9 million check to Bulletproof.

And while Bulletproof was born in Silicon Valley and, on the outside, seems to fall in the same category as artisanal coffee companies like Blue Bottle, Four Barrel, and Philz (which have all raised venture capital money), Asprey believes it’s different. Bulletproof is about health and about “hacking” food to make our bodies function better.

The idea of Bulletproof came to Asprey because of his battle with weight loss — at one point he weighed around 300 pounds, affecting all aspects of his health and ability to function.

“My brain started to fail,” he said. “I decided that the most important thing I could do was to lose the weight.” And since traditional diets hadn’t been effective for him, Asprey decided to do his own research. Bulletproof’s combination of coffee, medium-chain triglyceride oil (a type of easily digestible fat), and butter derived from a buttery tea he was served during a hiking trip in Tibet. The resulting upshot in energy inspired Asprey to start putting butter in his coffee.

Of course, there are skeptics of Bulletproof coffee’s alleged magical powers. And despite Asprey’s claim that the coffee-and-butter combo is as tasty as adding cream and sugar, it won’t possibly win over every coffee drinker around.

Trinity Ventures’ involvement in Bulletproof is no coincidence. Asprey joined the venture capital firm in 2010 as an entrepreneur-in-residence, and already deep into his new “hacking” lifestyle, caught the attention of partner Dan Scholnick.

“I noticed Dave hanging around the office and eating things and doing things that seemed weird to me,” Scholnick told Fortune. He eventually asked Asprey to shed some light on his antics, and Scholnick and Trinity have been supporter of Bulletproof ever since. In fact, both Scholnick and fellow Trinity Ventures partner Gus Tai are joining the company’s board as part of the deal, and Scholnick is a devout drinker of the potion.

Though Bulletproof has already begun to expand its product line, which now includes energy bars, and its new Fat Water, a formulation of water and medium-chain triglyceride oil, Asprey sees the coffee shop locations as an important way to hook new customers on the high-calorie concoction. As he said, anybody can buy and brew coffee — any coffee — at home, but Asprey wants to offer a store experience to his customers.

“The retail stores are a way to help people get exposed to the lifestyle,” Scholnick said. “I think that bulletproof has the potential to be a national and a global movement and brand.”

And Trinity Ventures should know a thing or two about that — the firm has invested not only in coffee chain giant Starbucks, but also in other food and beverage brick-and-mortar companies like P.F. Chang’s and Jamba Juice.

Nestle is using naked baristas to sell coffee creamer

Nestle is using the former to try and sell you the latter. It’s part of a new ad campaign for the Nestle-owned Coffee-Mate Natural Bliss, a line of naturally flavored dairy creamer launched in 2011.

Back on April 24, marketers from Nestle and ad agency 360i took over a small coffee shop, Irving Farm Coffee Roasters, on Irving Place in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The marketers set up shop in the store’s basement while naked models, covered only in body paint (a la Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue), served free coffee—and of course pushed Coffee-Mate creamer—to surprised customers. Additional models and actors in body paint sat in the cafe among the regular customers to add to the gag.

The advertisement resulting from that stunt hit the Web in full (and naked) force on Tuesday night. The video begins, “How would you react if your typical morning coffee was anything but?” The text then changes “but” to “butt.”

It’s part of Nestle’s all-digital ad campaign planned for the flavored creamer. Codie Richards, a marketing manager with Nestle, told AdWeek that the one-day pop-up shop “was totally new for us” and added, “We know that consumers want something natural in their creamer.”

Well, Nestle hopes they want the natural creamer. But will Millennials — that oh-so-coveted of target audiences — want to share the naked-barista video? To that effort, Nestle will push the minute-and-a-half video, plus a 30-second preview clip, to Facebook FB, YouTube and other social platforms in the days to come. It’s given the campaign the requisite social hashtag, too (#NaturalBlissCafé), and paid ad slots for the video will begin this month and run through September.

A spokesperson told Fortune the campaign is a way to tell the Natural Bliss story “in a cheeky and authentic way” (get it?) and is “designed to get consumers to take a closer look.”

The first Starbucks are coming to sub-Saharan Africa

Starbucks’ aspirations toward global domination are one more step toward fulfillment, as the company announced plans Tuesday to open its first stores in sub-Saharan Africa. Through a licensed partnership with Taste Holdings, a South African managing group, Starbucks will open a store in Johannesburg in the first half of 2016 with more to follow.

Through the agreement, Taste can operate the Starbucks stores for as long as 25 years, as well as open them in other African countries.

Southern Africa’s growing middle class is drawing more international business, according to Bloomberg. Middle-class households in sub-Saharan Africa are expected to increase to 40 million from the current 15 million by 2030.

Starbucks plans to tweak its menu for southern African tastes, featuring items like locally-brewed Rooibos tea. The coffee chain follows a similar tactic in other international locations, licensing out stores and altering menus to suit the location.

Currently, Starbucks has only a few locations in northern Africa, located in Casablanca and Cairo. The chain’s expansion into southern Africa will be something of a homecoming for the coffee beans it sells, a large portion of which hail from sub-Saharan Africa.

Starbucks is now offering its cold brew coffee nationwide

Just in time for the hottest days of summer, Starbucks SBUX is rolling out Cold Brew as a core menu item in its locations in Canada and the United States, the company announced Tuesday.

The coffee drink is made without heat; instead, the coffee grounds steep in cool water for 20 hours to create a sweet and concentrated drink. Cold Brew is considered a smoother drink than hot-brewed coffees because of the long steeping process.

Since an initial launch this spring, Cold Brew was only available across the Northeast and parts of the Midwest, where iced coffee sales are strongest year-round. The new drink will cost $3.25 for 16 ounces, according to USA Today — that’s 60 cents more than the $2.65 price tag for a similarly sized iced coffee.

But you don’t have to order fancier coffee to pay more at the Starbucks counter. Prices at the chain are generally rising. On Monday, Starbucks bumped up its brewed coffee prices across the board by as much as 20 cents.

The introduction of Cold Brew in Starbucks stores follows a national trend toward the naturally sweeter iced drink. This summer, Peet’s Coffee switched to only serving cold-brewed iced coffee drinks.

Starbucks is about to jack up prices

On Tuesday, Starbucks, the Seattle-based coffee chain, is preparing to boost its prices, AP reports. The cost of most affected drinks will rise somewhere between a nickel and 20 cents, the company says. The new price amounts to a price increase of roughly 1%.

For most people, this means the price of a brewed coffee will jump 10 cents, bumping the cost of a large coffee in most U.S. shops to $2.45, according to AP, although that figure varies regionally. The company says it will use the extra revenue to offset wage increases and rising rent.

Last year Starbucks SBUX raised its prices by a similar amount. Coffee prices had then been on the rise in commodity markets.

This year’s slate price increase, on the other hand, has nothing to do with the cost of coffee. Arabica futures, notes MarketWatch, have declined to 42% since last year’s high.

The new prices will affect certain brewed coffees, not the bagged variety.

Is the increase all because of rent? Perhaps that claim holds some water. On a recent episode of Fortune Live, Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff told host Leigh Gallagher that the the presence of a Starbucks within a quarter mile of a residence increased its property cost by about 96% on average between 1997 and 2014. Perhaps the company is a victim of its own halo effect. Watch the interview here:

Starbucks has big French expansion brewing with supermarket deal

France, home of the café allongé and the café au lait, is about to get a lot more American coffee coursing through its veins.

Starbucks SBUX, announced a deal on Tuesday with Casino Restauration that will pave the way for a potentially major expansion in France, giving the cafe chain a bigger footprint in a market that has long resisted the filtered coffee Americans flock to.

Under the terms of the licensing partnership deal, Starbucks and Casino Restauration, a subsidiary of Groupe Casino, will open full-size and full-service Starbucks stores within Géant Casino Hypermarkets and Casino Supermarkets grocery stores across France, with the first location set to open by the end of 2015.

While Starbucks didn’t say how many cafés it planned to open under the partnership, the potential is huge: Groupe Casino runs 127 hypermarkets (i.e. a superstore) and 444 supermarkets in France. That could lead to a multiplication of its store count in France, a country of 65 million where Starbucks only has about 100 locations. (By contrast, there are 280 Starbucks cafes in New York City, which has 8.4 million people.) France is a relatively untapped market for Starbucks: its store fleet in the country represents a tiny fraction of its 2,200 cafes across the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region.

“This new partnership with Casino Restauration means we can deliver a quality Starbucks experience to many more people in convenient locations across France,” said Kris Engskov, president of Starbucks EMEA. “Casino Restauration has the perfect network and local expertise.”

France is a relatively untapped market for Starbucks: its store fleet in the country represents a tiny fraction of its 2,200 cafes across the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region.

While French consumers have often been seen as resistant to American food and beverage chains, they have a history of coming around and embracing them. A case in point is McDonald’s MCD, which counts France as its largest European market.

Here’s why we’re suddenly consuming less coffee

Keurig Green Mountain’s K-Cups have gotten plenty of flak for being wasteful. In 2014, the company sold enough non-recyclable containers to circle the earth 10.5 times. The cups almost always end up in landfills. But Keurig machines might also be creating less waste, in a manner of speaking.

According to a biannual report on coffee released Friday by the USDA, coffee consumption is declining in the United States for the first time since 2009-2010. The reason? The rise of Keurig machines means fewer Americans are pouring their extra drip coffee down the drain.

According to the report, coffee consumption will drop in 2015-16 from 24 million 60kg bags to 23.7 million. While the decline is slight, it makes the United States the only top coffee-drinking country to see demand fall after steady growth.

Meanwhile, spending on coffee is up. Reuters reports that while Americans spent a record $11.9 billion on coffee in 2014, they’ll be spending $13.6 billion by 2016. Almost a quarter of American homes now own Keurig-style machines. But since the brewers generally only make one cup at a time, Americans who used to make a pot of drip coffee for themselves each morning no longer have to pour half their coffee down the drain. Says one roaster to Reuters: “We’re losing the sink as a consumer.”

Sorry, San Francisco: Starbucks is closing La Boulange

It’s long been a popular hang for San Francisco pastry lovers, and a meeting spot for Silicon Valley techies, and soon it will be no more. Starbucks is set to close all 23 locations of La Boulange bakeries by the end of September.

The coffee giant bought the small pastry chain from the Next World Group, an investment firm, in 2012 for $100 million. It was one of the biggest acquisitions it had made at that time. It was a move to beef up Starbucks’s food offerings, and it worked for a time.

At the time of the deal, CEO Howard Schultz said that Starbucks would now be “able to say that we are bakers.” Now the company has deemed it more worthwhile to focus on its core business instead. As the Wall Street Journal points out, the stores built up “a cultlike following in the Bay Area.”

La Boulange is just one of many food brands Starbucks has bought over the years, including Teavana, Evolution Fresh, Seattle’s Best, and, last year, Hacienda Alsacia, a coffee farm in Costa Rica. It has since closed the Seattle’s Best stores and now plans to close its Evolution Fresh store in San Francisco. Howard Schultz, who took some fire recently for the botched “Race Together” program, was Fortune‘s Businessperson of the Year in 2011.

La Boulange, which has 14 of its 23 locations in San Francisco, will become an in-house Starbucks brand, which means that customers may not have to bid adieu to the pastries and lunch sandwiches themselves, but just to the La Boulange stores and potentially the brand name.

Renee Jones, marketing director at Starbucks, said the new flavors represent “a few of the most popular recipes” that have been tinkered with over the years by enthusiastic customers.

Starbucks SBUX has established a reputation for testing new flavor concoctions for its drinks. The Frappuccino in particular generates a lot of media attention, including two notable stories this year. A limited edition “mini” version of the Frappuccino is currently being sold at the company’s coffee shops. Even a cookie straw that’s being used in a new Frappuccino caught the eyes (and mouths) of national media.

Why all the fuss? Well, it makes sense that savvy marketer Starbucks would want to piggyback off the drink’s 20-year anniversary.

But even from a business perspective, the Frappuccino is a pretty big deal. Before that drink was introduced, Starbucks was pretty reliant on selling hot drinks and hadn’t really ventured into warm weather markets. But the Frappuccino and other cold beverage offerings helped boost demand during the summer months, rather than be so heavily reliant on the holiday season. The drink is so culturally important to Starbucks that it even has its own verified Twitter account.